FILM CLIPS / Also opening this week

Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 22, 2002

'EL CRIMEN DEL PADRE AMARO (THE CRIME OF FATHER AMARO)'

Drama. Starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Directed by Carlos Carrera. Written by Vicente Lenero. (R. 120 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. At Bay Area theaters.)

The source material for "El Crimen de Padre Amaro," a Mexican film about an errant priest, is a Portuguese novel published in 1875. Given that said priest falls in love with a 16-year-old girl, impregnates her and then sullies himself with various levels of church corruption, it couldn't be more contemporary.

"Crime," which broke box-office records in Mexico with its steamy brew of forbidden passion, stars Gael Garcia Bernal, the gifted young star of "Y Tu Mama Tambien." Bernal plays Padre Amaro, a newly ordained priest, just 24, who reports for duty in a Mexican village and discovers a parish built on corruption.

Exuding rectitude, Amaro meets Padre Benito (Sancho Gracia), a crusty old priest who's bonking his maid and financing a new health clinic with a drug lord's pesos. The local roster also includes Padre Natalio (Damian Alcazar), who makes his political bed with mountain guerrillas and a gossip-stirring crone (scene-stealer Luisa Huertas) who pilfers the collection plate and feeds communion wafers to her cat.

Amaro discovers his own feet of clay when he falls for Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon), a devout teen who reaches out to him in confession -- literally -- admitting to her "sensual" urges. Amelia's journalist boyfriend explodes with jealousy, and Amelia pleads with Amaro to renounce his vows and marry her.

This is basically high-class melodrama -- Mexican soap opera on a Cadillac budget -- but Bernal is subtly effective as Amaro, a man so idealistic that his own weakness comes as a surprise to him. Director Carlos Carrera also understands the fierce power of the Catholic Church in Mexico and conveys the character of this tiny, insular community through richness of detail.

"Interview With the Assassin" belongs to the fake-documentary drama genre that "The Blair Witch Project" also belonged to, but here the monster is not off-camera but right in front of it and glaring with two dead-looking eyes. He's the assassin, the man who claims to be the "second gunman" in the JFK assassination, the one who took the fatal shot, captured for all time on the Zapruder film -- the shot that to most eyes looks as though it came from the front, from "the grassy knoll."

"Interview" has in its favor a compelling subject and a spooky performance by Raymond J. Barry, who looks old and mean enough to have done it. But the movie's storytelling is limp, and writer-director Neil Burger's ultimate unwillingness to commit to a point of view -- was this guy really the assassin? -- seems artistically chicken-hearted. In the end, the movie bogs down in insignificance, saying nothing about Kennedy's assassination and revealing nothing about the pathology it pretends to investigate.

If anything, the movie seems merely a cautionary tale about the dangers of interviewing one's neighbors. Ron (Dylan Haggerty) is an out-of-work cameraman who agrees to film his neighbor's confession on video and ends up threatened, pursued and paranoid.

The strategic mistake of "Interview" is that it seems to regard Ron as its protagonist, when the audience hardly cares about his troubles. We want to know about the assassin.

Perhaps it's just a matter of one man out-acting another. Barry is fascinating, a real criminal type, one of those rare old fellows who has not grown wiser, or more mellow, or kinder with the passing years, just more decrepit, more smoldering, more sly and more dangerous.

Haggerty, by contrast, just plays a whining Everyman, and he does it all- too-convincingly and without much charm.

Drama. Directed and written by Digvijay Singh. (Not rated. 105 minutes. In Hindi with English subtitles. At the Roxie Cinema through Nov. 26.)

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In India, where tradition is constantly in conflict with the tide of progress, religious customs often die hard -- even one as brutal as the ritual deflowering of a girl after her first menstrual period.

"Maya," a film by Digvijay Singh, takes a sharp look at that ritual and makes its case against child abuse of any description. Singh, who wrote as well as directed, is clever in the way he opens the film on a light note -- only hinting at the impending drama.

At 12, Maya (Nitya Shetty) is spunky and rambunctious, romping in the Indian countryside, sharing a home with the wealthy aunt and uncle who act as foster parents. Cousin Sanjay (Nikhil Yadav) is her partner in crime; the local candy vendor is the frequent victim of their pranks.

"Maya" shifts emotional gears, from sweet fable to tragedy, when her aunt and uncle arrange for the "prayer ceremony" that observes a young girl's passage into womanhood. A pujari, or Hindu priest (Virendra Saxena), is engaged, and a nervous Maya is dressed in a fresh sari, makeup and a spray of flowers in her hair.

Behind the closed doors of the temple, Maya is seated on a ledge and gang- raped by the pujari and other priests. Singh films the rape from thighs down, knowing that the unseen is often more horrifying than the seen.

At the close of "Maya" a title card tells us that an estimated 5,000 to 15, 000 girls are similarly assaulted each year in India. The fact that this ritual still exists -- and is justified as religious custom -- is remarkable, especially considering that the parents, like those in "Maya," condone it.

Nitya Shetty isn't a strong actress, and the aftermath of the rape lacks the dramatic power that a more expressive actress might give it. The photography is gorgeous, though, and with Singh's precise, discreet direction, "Maya" has a devastating impact.

It has sex, it has laughs, it has drama, it has beautiful shots of the Peruvian Amazon and it's based on a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa -- and yet, "Pantaleon y Las Visitadoras" is a pedestrian film that provides little more than a superficial treat.

The story revolves around a handsome, upstanding military man named Pantaleon Pantoja (Salvador del Solar) who is sent on a secret mission: Go to the Amazon and start an operation that provides prostitutes ("visitors," in the language of the military brass) to Peruvian soldiers who are stationed in the jungle. By filling their sexual needs, the army believes, the Amazon military will stop assaulting the local women.

Pantoja falls in lust/love with one of the prostitutes, a ravishing woman (Angie Cepeda) who goes by the name La Colombiana. Pantoja is happily married, has a child on the way and doesn't drink or smoke -- but, drawn irresistibly by his desire for La Colombiana, he throws his morals away. It's worth it to him, and when his brothel operation becomes a success, his life couldn't be better.

Del Solar is the best part of "Pantaleon." Rarely smiling, devoted to his career and his libido, he makes his character an efficient, carnal captain who succeeds at all costs. That includes bribing an obnoxious local radio personality (Aristoteles Picho) who threatens to expose his operation. Picho's performance is another strength of "Pantaleon." Cepeda and the other prostitutes are eye candy. Cepeda takes off her clothes a lot, has sweaty romps with her new man and looks great against the flora and fauna of the Amazon, but her acting can't sustain this silly movie. . This film contains nudity, sex and violence.

"Love in the Time of Money" is another modern reworking of Arthur Schnitzler's "Reigen," best known in America under its French title, "La Ronde. " The play, which depicts a series of linked sexual encounters, provides a convenient structure for depicting a cross-section of society, as well as for showing how a venereal disease can travel from one person to just about everybody.

Written and directed by Peter Mattei, the new movie purports to present Manhattan at the end of the millennium, before the recession and before Sept. 11. Mattei gives us a world of spiritual malaise and dislocation, and yet the title feels like an afterthought, an attempt to confer an importance that isn't there. The problems of the people in "Love in the Time of Money" are hardly specific to their era. They just have problems, which are neither original nor are presented in convincing way.

The whole fun of the "La Ronde" structure is that every scene becomes a sex scene: One person has sex with another who has sex with another until eventually the chain arrives back at the original person. In every scene, two unlikely lovers meet, and we wonder how will it happen and wait for the fireworks. But "Love in the Time of Money" violates the structure by having encounters end without any sex act.

This presents a problem, not only in that we lose the venereal disease aspect (not this movie's concern) but also in that we lose the circularity, the sense of a society in which everyone is directly linked -- not just spiritually or emotionally but tangibly. Also, having scenes end without sex is a too-easy way out. How could these people possibly end up together, we ask ourselves. And the answer is, they don't.

So the best we can take from "Love" is a few stolen moments. Like when Steve Buscemi, playing a painter in pursuit of a young secretary (Rosario Dawson), asks her, "Do I seem like a desperate psycho?" and she answers, "Yeah,

a little." It's the perfect answer. He does, but only a little. . This film contains strong language, implied violence and sexual situations.

-- Mick LaSalle

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